On Sept. 20, 2025, scientists from around the world gathered at a conference in Shanghai to launch the International Consortium for Primate Brain Mapping (ICPBM). “We want to know the neural architecture underlying all the brain’s functions,” says ICPBM chair Mu-ming Poo, scientific director of the Institute of Neuroscience, Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The new consortium aims to analyze marmoset, macaque, and human brains to create so-called multiomic atlases, which would include all cell types; their patterns of gene expression based on RNA transcripts, or transcriptomes; and each cell’s projections across the brain. Set to run for 25 years, the effort will produce multiomic maps not just for monkeys but for developing, adult, aging, and diseased human brains from diverse populations.

“The scale of what’s being proposed is mind-blowing,” says consortium member Marcello Rosa, a neuroscientist at Monash University. “You could dismiss some of the aims as unattainable even in 25 years,” he says, “except it was clear from the presentations that the technical issues are being worked out in a systematic manner.” Hongkui Zeng, director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, who attended the conference but is not a consortium member, says the results “will have a tremendous impact on the field.”

ICPBM so far includes nine institutions from Australia, China, Germany, Hungary, India, South Korea, and Spain. Tensions with China have deterred U.S. institutions from signing on, although U.S. scientists are among the more than 100 individual participants from 25 countries. Shanghai authorities and China’s central government have pledged funding—the precise amounts are still under negotiation, Poo says—for the ICPBM, including a central hub that would establish facilities for imaging brain tissue at submicron scales, provide research materials such as human brains from autopsies, and maintain a web platform for data sharing. Other members will contribute their own samples, molecular studies, and mapping.

The potential payoff includes insights into cellular and molecular mechanisms behind neurological conditions from stroke to Alzheimer’s disease that could point to new treatments. The results might also hold clues to the cognitive processes that make us uniquely human.